By KATIE MOISSE
June 23, 2011
Cocaine cut with the veterinary drug levamisole could be the culprit in a flurry of flesh-eating disease in New York and Los Angeles.
The drug, used to deworm cattle, pigs and sheep, can rot the skin off noses, ears and cheeks. And over 80 percent of the country's coke supply contains it.
More: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/flesh-eating-cocaine-laced-veterinary-drug-levamisole/story?id=13902353
Me... I'll stick with my cheap red wine, just as I said in a newspaper column several years ago:
I'll drink to that!
Does alcohol really kill brain cells?
By Jim Castagnera
Catholic guilt ... that's what it was all about when I was growing up in a German-American parish in Jim Thorpe, Pa.
Believe me, it was scary. If you choked on the first bite of a hamburger on a Friday, you went straight to hell. Girls who hid pictures of Bobby Rydell in their purses were tramps by definition. A "C" in obedience or self-control on your report card meant a slap in the face from the parish priest in front of your entire class. At age 11, I missed Anthony Quinn in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", because I had to sit home that night and write 500 times, "I will not talk when Father Adolph is in the classroom".
Worst of all, though, was the news - first delivered in high school by a portly nun, who I suspect enjoyed her port-ly wine after school back in the convent - that "every sip of alcohol kills a million brain cells".
This news flash didn't stop me from guzzling my share of beer as a college fraternity member a few years later. But the notion gnawed at the back of my brain, regardless of whether the alcohol was gnawing away in there, too.
Over the years, and now (heaven help me) the decades, I've encountered this dire warning again and again. Drinking buddies have mouthed with cavalier aplomb, "I'm not killing brain cells. I'm just pruning to allow for new growth". Ha, ha, we replied with uneasy snickers.
Sometimes it seemed to me that Mother Nature's message - like that stout old nun's - was, "If it's fun, it'll probably kill you".
No longer! The latest news from our nation's laboratories has been nothing but good.
For instance, a team of scientists at the University of North Carolina has demonstrated that alcoholic mice, having been forced to go cold turkey, experienced a burst of brand-new brain cells. I'll bet they stopped tripping over their own tails, too.
Other researchers have demonstrated that moderate consumption of alcohol results in better thinking, reasoning and memory skills than tea-totaling.
What, then, about some immoderate consumption?
Well, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald all wrote some great stuff under the influence. Of course, Hemingway also shot himself. But, hey, no pain, no gain. Or, if you prefer: no bottle, no genie.
Some scientists actually counted the number of neurons inside the heads of alcoholics and non-alcoholics - after they were dead, I assume - and found that there was no real difference.
This terrific news doesn't solve all my "Catholic guilt" problems, of course. I can't look at one of those Internet porno sites without expecting my eyeballs to roll onto the floor. It's hard to see the screen with my head tilted way back, and holding the monitor overhead makes my arms really tired.
I also feel guilty when I stub my toe, while answering a late-night call of nature, and forget to shout, "Oh, fudge".
Still, as I grow older, I have learned to count life's little blessings. That I can drink my cheap red wine without worrying that it is making me any dumber than old age acting on its own ... well, let's just say, I'll drink to that.
Jim Castagnera is an attorney and a journalist who lives and writes in Havertown.
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